François Nonnenmacher (EN) | FR

The Register explains the reasons behind the Mac OpenOffice delay. It boils down to very few things, among which the lack of human force (two half-time Mac OS developers over the past two years) and the lack of interest from Sun:

We checked with Sun's Irwin Tenhumberg, product marketing manager for Sun who confirmed that the community has stuck to an eighteen-month cycle for OpenOffice - so much for the "delay" to version 2.0.

Tenhumberg confirmed that Sun doesn't provide internal coding manpower to the Mac community, as it packages versions for Windows, Linux and Solaris as StarOffice.

"It's more in Apple interests than ours to provide more than backline support for OpenOffice," he told us.

Sun's position is understandable, although I think it would serve their goal to displace Microsoft out of the desktop (but they are still locked into the thinking that every software they do serves only one purpose: sell more Sun hardware). This leaves two opportunities for Apple, either jump in and throw some resources at OpenOffice for Mac, or complement their first component of an Apple-brand office suite, Keynote, with what's missing. I'd prefer the latter, unless OpenOffice has a usable interface for Mac OS X. If it looks like the Gimp, well, bad luck. The Gimp, compared to Photoshop, looks like Quasimodo compared to Esmeralda. With people, such as Quasimodo, you should not focus on the envelope, but in terms of software, the interface remains the key to the application's functionalities.

P.S. bloggers and wiki participants beware, since the Reg article is written by Andrew Orlowski, he just cannot prevent himself to vomit on weblogs and wikis while writing on an entirely different matter. In polite French, he is hors sujet and that's too bad for a journalist.

P.S. 2: And according to Niklas Gustavsson, we shouldn't expect Sun to come up with the best interface in town.